Clubhouse overhaul is on the horizon
Social audio app founder Paul Davison teases major shake-up
This week saw great excitement around the Clubhouse weekly town hall. Whispers that this may be the moment for us to hear what they’ve been working on behind closed doors for many months filtered into the DMs. While it turned out not to be The Big Reveal, the town hall did offer some insight into what we can expect to see once the changes happen.
There’s no doubt Paul Davison was priming the town hall audience for a major shake-up of the app. He told the 2,000+ listeners:
“It’s going to be a pretty big update. We have added some very new ways to connect. We’ve removed some features that you might use today.
“We’ve made a lot of changes and our goal in doing this is to make Clubhouse better and easier for more people to use.
“We’ve always believed that the best thing that we can do for the existing community is to continue to grow the community and to do by making the app simpler, by making it easier to use, making it more fun.
“I know that making big UI changes can be jarring. Having it change on you is hard and we don’t take that lightly.”
During his 20 minute update the direction of the app was made pretty clear. This is not going to be a place for audio creation, social audio radio shows or even podcasters. In future Clubhouse will be a platform where conversation is the key to making new friendships and building and joining communities.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder how important the realtime nature of social audio will be to the new-look Clubhouse. Could we see the removal of the recording feature in a bid to promote more in-the-moment conversations? Certainly engaging with the audio actively, rather than listening passively to a replay, aligns with much of what Paul was saying.
The town hall replay appears to be unavailable in the Clubhouse app. Michael Sterling captured some clips from the Room which we discussed in this week’s All Things Audio podcast.
✂️ Cut The Tape
The Clubhouse update will see an overhaul of the app
The user interface will look very different
Features we are used to seeing over there will be removed
The app will focus on ways for users to forge friendships over social audio - “helping everyone talk, participate and have fun.”
It will not be for broadcast or for audio creators. It will be for building communities.
Founder Paul Davison said the future of Clubhouse would not be “maximising reach to a faceless audience.”
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Clubhouse is going all in on communities and friendship. On this week’s #AllThingsAudio Michael Sterling joins Madalyn and Suze to discuss this week's Clubhouse town hall which focussed on the major updates we can expect in the app over the coming weeks and months.
There's also discussion around what X might be planning to do with podcasts on the platform.
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As you can imagine The A Sound Effect Podcast is on my regular listen list. Some interesting topics picked up on in this episode as we hear from Jason Cushing of SoundMorph. His discussion around designing and creating plug-ins, as well as his critique and extensive reading from Rick Rubin’s recent book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” made for interesting listening. A decent attempt at exploring AI and machine learning in the sound industry with plenty to think about long after it finishes.
This week on the Substack chat Maya Chupkov and
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See you next week,
Suze